A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA
by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2026
Fourth Sunday After Pentecost/A • June 21, 2026
Genesis 21:9-21
In 2009, the Bloomfield Hills Andover High School held our 40th Class Reunion. There were two remarkable things about this to me. One was that it started with a few of us from the old artsy, sarcastic, theatre group—notably both of us who were elected Class Cynic in 1969—reconnecting over Facebook. That spread until the former Cool Kids did what they always did and took it over, completely changing the event into an expensive dinner at a country club. We were 40 years, but the old dynamics still operated, and I ended up growling to Jacquelyn about it endlessly. The other thing that was remarkable was that we all had changed. My best friend came; he used to be a kind of round guy with his hair in a ponytail; I didn’t recognize the skinny, balding guy with the “Richard” name tag. I think that’s when it dawned on me that I had changed too; I wasn’t 140 lbs. anymore, and there wasn’t much left of my long hair either. Our lives unfold, we change, and yet some of the old stuff always remains.
That’s one of the things I get out of the story we read this morning. This summer, I want to focus on the story of the patriarchs with you, but we have some catching up to do. Two weeks ago, we heard how God called Abram and Sarai out of their home and sent them on a journey to a promise. The promise was a place to live as God’s people and generations to come after them. Now we heard this story about Sarah and Hagar and their sons and Abraham. Just like with the class reunion, a lot has gone on. So first, let’s catch up. Today is like when you missed a few episodes of a series and you have to binge-watch to catch up.
When we left Abram and Sarai, they were just packing up and moving. They ended up going all the way to Egypt, a long walk. They get into trouble there; that’s a juicy story I suggest you go read on your own. They get kicked out of Egypt, but perhaps while they are there, they acquire an Egyptian maid for Sarai. Along the way, God comes again and makes a covenant with them and changes their names: they become Abraham and Sarah. It’s like losing your hair: life changes you, and they are changed. Still no child, and honestly? Sarah’s really gotten too old for a child. She must have grieved for this, don’t you think? She must have wondered what happened to that part of God’s promise, and Abraham wondered too, I’m sure. How was the promise ever going to be fulfilled?
So she does what women still do. She decides to use the best technology of the time for a woman who can’t get pregnant. In this time, that means getting a surrogate mother. The custom is to officially send your maid to your husband, have her get pregnant with him; I’m not going into all the details. Because she’s your maid, it’s as if it’s your child; because it’s your husband, it’s his as well. So she sends her maid Hagar to Abraham. Hagar has a baby, and he’s named Ishmael, which means “God hears”. So all is well: Abraham has a son, they move to Canaan, and it looks like the promise is working out.
Except this isn’t God’s plan. They’ve missed an important step: waiting for God to fulfill the promise. Instead, Sarah has decided to hurry things along. Our patience and God’s timing don’t always align, and they didn’t here. That doesn’t mean God’s late; it means we’re early. One day, three mysterious visitors appear; Abraham has a big barbecue in their honor. Even today in the Middle East in traditional culture, women and men don’t eat together, and the host doesn’t eat with the guests; he serves them. So the visitors sit down to eat, Sarah is outside the tent listening in, Abraham is getting the food out, and wow! It turns out one of the visitors is God! This is a thing we miss about God: the way God shows up when least expected. And what God says is that in the spring, Sarah is going to have a baby.
Now these people aren’t stupid. They certainly know there’s a point in a woman’s life where she’s no longer able to conceive. So when Sarah hears this, she thinks what women think when men say things that show they are totally ignorant about women. And she laughs, she laughs so hard they hear her in the tent. God asks about her laughing; Abraham tries to cover up as husbands sometimes do and says she didn’t laugh, but they all know the truth. God asks the fundamental question all people of faith have to answer: is anything too hard for God? It turns out that having an old woman get pregnant isn’t, and sure enough, in the spring Sarah has a baby, and he’s named ‘Isaac’, which means “one who laughs”. Babies are weaned after about three years back then, so that day comes, and Abraham holds another big feast to celebrate. Ishmael, —remember Ishmael?—is about 15. Now we’re all caught up to the story we read today.
The story starts with a party; it’s important to remember that these people don’t live alone, they are part of a whole group, herding animals. The boys are playing; it may be that Ishmael is teasing Isaac, the Hebrew is obscure. Sarah doesn’t like it and she doesn’t like the idea that Ishmael might compete with her son. Sarah and Hagar have had a difficult relationship all along. So she goes to Abraham and says, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Notice that she doesn’t even name Hagar and Ishmael; it’s “this slave woman” and “her son”. This is how we distance ourselves from people, isn’t it? We have an instinctive kindness that operates when we see someone as an individual, even more when we know their name; when we are going to be cruel, we prefer not to use names, we refer to them by some group. Sarah is proud of her son, she’s proud of her role in fulfilling God’s promise and she doesn’t want that muddied up with Ishmael.
Abraham doesn’t like it but he goes along with what she says. Helpfully, he comes up with these ideas of God’s plan: that both boys will become the patriarchs of clans somehow. So he takes a skin of water and some bread, does what Sarah demanded, casts them out into the wilderness. It reminds me of Adam and Eve: Eve takes the fruit from the forbidden tree and gives it to Adam, remember? He just eats what he’s given. Here, Abraham just does what Sarah says.
It’s meant to lift up a mirror to our lives: how God’s promise weaves through them, how our pride and anger sometimes get in the way. Of course, the water runs out; of course, the bread runs out; anyone who’s ever fed a 15-year-old boy knows food doesn’t last long with them. So before long, Hagar and Ishmael are starving and dying of thirst. Hagar puts him under a tree, goes off a ways, because she can’t stand to see him suffer. She cries; he’s crying too. There, in the parched wilderness, where silence engulfs the world, perhaps the only sound is their cries. Until an angel, a messenger from God, speaks up and answers the cry. Suddenly, she sees an oasis with a well, and they are saved. I love a happy ending, don’t you?
There’s a lot to learn here about how God works in the world, how God works with us. The first thing is that God’s purpose is like the tide; it can’t be resisted, it can’t be hurried. Sarah and Abraham tried to use Hagar to hurry things along; now Hagar is crying in the wilderness because their plan led to anger and spite.
The second thing is that God hears cries in the wilderness. Hagar is the first person in the whole Bible to weep; later, we’re going to see that God consistently hears cries. This past week included the celebration of Juneteenth, the day when slavery was finally ended in our country. We have all kinds of words to cover up the horror of that Holocaust. We talk about the “antebellum South”, forgetting that it was a place of oppression for most of its people. We call the places where slaves worked “plantations” when they were really slave labor camps. In those camps, people were treated as less than animals; they were whipped and tortured and literally worked to death until finally a great and awful war, one of its battles on our very doorstep, was fought to end that terrible curse. President Lincoln recognized in his Second Inaugural address the connection between the destruction of the Civil War and the sin of slavery.
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. [https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp]
God heard the cry of those slaves and freed them, and thank God for that.
Now we read this story, and it challenges us to ask: who are we sending into the wilderness? What cries are coming to God? Who have we refused to name? What cares is God hearing, and how does God intend to use us to answer those cries? If we are following Christ, surely he means to lead us to those who hurt in order to heal; if we are following Christ, surely he means to lead us to those who are crying to give hope.
At the end of the story, Hagar and Ishmael find new life. Hagar gets Ishmael a wife in Egypt; their story will go on. It’s an article of faith in Islam that the Prophet Muhammad, the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, is descended from Ishmael, just as it is an article of faith in Judaism that Jews are descended from Isaac. The Apostle Paul says we are adopted into this family as children of Abraham.
So this is our family story: not everyone acts well all the time. We stumble, but we walk forward. And if we walk forward in faith, following Christ, it can only be that we also learn to hear the cries in the wilderness. For as Paul said, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making an appeal through us.
Amen